The Second E. F. Benson Megapack

by E. F. Benson

  “You are very cruel, Eva,” said he.

  Lord Hayes shut his window. Perhaps the night air was unwholesome after all. In any case, he had heard enough. Suspicion was running down the avenue, and growing clearer at every step. He hesitated a moment, and then left his room and walked downstairs. As he came out into the courtyard he heard the echo of Eva’s light, cruel laughter.

  Jim Armine was standing in front of her, with his arms hanging listlessly by his side. He did not look exactly happy, and the sight of Lord Hayes only added a very slightly deeper shade to his face.

  Eva’s husband never felt more methodically cool in his life. He had quite determined what to do. She had not seen him approach, and a smile still lingered on her lips. She was lying back in her chair, in indolent languor; only in her eyes was amusement and excitement.

  “You looked very fine just then,” she was saying to Jim, and turning, she saw her husband.

  The smile died off her lips, the amusement from her eyes. Only that air of utter languor was left. But she saw her vengeance coming near, as Lord Hayes had seen suspicion, and she met it joyfully.

  Lord Hayes laid his hand on the young man’s shoulder.

  “The steamers only go twice a week to Marseilles,” he said, “and there will be no steamer tomorrow. In the meantime, I am sure you will see the advisability of your spending the next two nights at the Hotel St. George. They say it is a very good hotel. Of course we shall not receive callers.”

  Eva shifted her position slightly, and looked at her husband.

  “Kindly explain why he should go off so suddenly,” she said.

  “I would not insult you by doing so.”

  “The insult lies in your silence. I suppose you overheard something.”

  “Yes,” said her husband. “I was listening.”

  “Ah! That is so like you. What were you listening for?”

  “I was listening more or less for what I heard.”

  “In fact, you suspected something of the sort?”

  “Yes.”

  “And yet you did not warn me. Go away, Mr. Armine, and don’t listen, please. Sit down, Hayes; I wish to talk to you. What a lovely night it is. Quite idyllic. By the way, I wish to know whether your suspicions are entirely confined to him.”

  “Absolutely and entirely.”

  “You are quite sure?”

  “Quite.”

  “That is good,” said Eva. “But naturally I wanted to know. To return—why did you not warn me?”

  Lord Hayes found that things were not going exactly as he had foreseen.

  “I did not think it would be of any use to warn you,” he said at length.

  “Then, as you have no suspicions whatever of me, what purpose is served by his going away?”

  “His presence here, under this roof, is an insult to you and me.”

  “Yet you did not warn me,” said Eva. “It seems to me that you have cancelled the insult to yourself. Shall I tell you exactly what has happened, or do you know it all?”

  “I know enough,” he said.

  “Possibly, from your point of view. But I am afraid you must have left your box before the end. The end was important. How much did you hear exactly? However, it doesn’t matter. He said something—well, extremely ill-judged, and I told him he had mistaken me altogether. I laughed as well. Did you hear me laugh? I said I had not the slightest doubt of his devotion, but that I did not feel the least inclined to accept it. I don’t appreciate devotion, except my husband’s, of course.”

  Eva waited a moment. A refined cruelty waits a little every now and then for the full effect of the pain to be felt.

  “It is impossible that he should remain here,” said he.

  “Please listen to me a moment. I have not finished yet. You have insulted me grossly, twice; in the first place, by not warning me, in the second, by listening. I do not like insults in the least, and I have no intention of receiving them. Jim committed an extreme indiscretion, for which you are mainly responsible. If you had spoken to him or me before, this would not have happened. Again, if you had not listened, you would have known nothing of it, and you will be good enough to take my word for it, that no one would have been the worse. He would have learnt a lesson, and I should have had the pleasure of teaching it him. I did not expect this in the least, for I did not think he would have been so foolish as to speak of it.”

  The degradation which her husband would have imposed on her grew more and more bitter. She stood up with intense anger intensely repressed.

  “I choose that he should stop,” she said. “I despise you for listening. If you like, you may insist on his going, and, if you do, I shall go too. I tell you I am perfectly reckless, and perfectly determined. Your point is that I have been insulted. It was you who insulted me by not giving me warning, and if you play the spy on me in this way, I owe you absolutely nothing. That is all. You may choose; and choose quickly.”

  She waited a moment, giving him time to reply.

  “Apparently you have nothing to say. In fact, there is nothing for you to say. That is all, then. If you are going to sit out here with us, you had better tell them to bring you a chair. Understand me quite clearly; it is over. I shall never allude to this again, and I must ask you not to, either.”

  Lord Hayes walked away without saying a word. Eva stood still one moment, steadying herself, and then she called out to Jim, who was leaning against a pillar at the opposite corner of the court.

  “You can come back,” she said. “We are not going to send you away. Let us go on talking from the last remark but two.”

  She settled herself again in her chair and laughed. The evening had been unexpectedly amusing.

  “He will not listen again, and you will not talk nonsense again, I hope. Really, this is an unique position, and I am the only one of the three who comes out of it with credit. A suspects that B, his friend, is making love to his wife. Does not warn her, but listens, and hears something that confirms his suspicions. Tries to drive B out of the house. They all meet amicably at breakfast next morning.”

  Certainly, if Eva had felt she had any small score to wipe off against her husband, she had wiped it off very cleanly. He was, for those few moments when she had stood up with her intense anger thoroughly in hand, mortally afraid of her, and she knew it. She had used her anger as a weapon against him, and had not let it act wildly, or unpremeditatedly. She well knew that, as a weapon, anger is most useful when it is skilfully handled, controlled, compressed. A horse without a rider, lashed into the enemies’ lines, may, it is true, do some service by promiscuous kicking, but it is a blind, ungoverned force; a skilful rider, however, who adapts its savage strength to his own intelligence, can guide it and direct it, and its destructive potentialities are increased tenfold.

  It was as a serviceable though savage brute that Eva employed her anger against her husband; she spurred it and lashed it into fury, but never gave it its head. That cruel, governed anger of women is a very terrible thing; the hot, blustering anger of a man is like a squib that bursts and jumps here and there, sometimes singeing its immediate surroundings and, perhaps, breaking something, but it wastes its force in childish, cracker-like explosions that hurt nothing but sensitive nerves, which regard such exhibitions as a lamentable want of taste. But Eva’s anger could not have offended the most fastidious; it gave no annoying little bangs, no unexpected leaps, no fizzing, no unmomentous crackling; it was still, deep, intense, not pleasant to fight with.

  Eva and Jim sat in the little courtyard for some half-hour more, which was rather a hard burden for the young man. To Eva it appeared to be no effort to talk as usual. She had required just one moment in which to steady herself, to dismount her quivering, indignant steed, and then for her, as she had told her husband, it was over. She had been angry, furious, insulted, and she had used the whip with a vengeance. The offence and the punishment were past, and she threw the whip into a corner. But Jim was silent, which was not altogether unnatural.
He had no taste for scenes, and his great coup, his ace of trumps, which, to his shame, had been forced from him, seemed to have fallen very flat. He had played it, and Eva had seen it, but that was all—it had simply been wasted. Naturally enough he felt he had spoiled his hand. Eva had laughed at him, but she had not been offended. Surely such an attitude was almost unprecedented.

  When she went upstairs half-an-hour later, she turned into her husband’s room to get a book she wanted, and found him sitting by the window, as if expecting her. He rose as she entered, and stood like a servant waiting for orders. But Eva gave no orders, and, having found her book, only remarked that it was growing a little chilly. He did not reply, and she turned to look at him. There was something miserably shrunken about his appearance which was rather pitiful.

  “You look tired,” she said. “I should go to bed if I were you.”

  He did not meet her eyes, but continued to look out of the window.

  “It has been a terrible night,” he said.

  Eva frowned.

  “It has been nothing of the sort,” she said. “Don’t be absurd, Hayes. You made a very bad mistake; you did not treat me in the way I wish to be treated, and I was intensely angry with you. But I assure you I am angry no longer. It is quite over, as far as I am concerned. Don’t let us quarrel more than is necessary. Just now, it is quite unnecessary to quarrel.”

  Lord Hayes had a certain potentiality for being malignant.

  “It is not the quarrelling,” he said; “it is the mutual position that I find we occupy to each other.”

  She grew a little impatient.

  “Let that be enough,” she said. “We only waste words.”

  She came a step nearer to him, and laid her hand on his shoulder, as if he had been a woman, or she a man.

  “Come,” she said, “be sensible. There is nothing more to say about it. You had better go to bed. Good-night!”

  THE RUBICON (Part 2)

  CHAPTER IV.

  The little grey ghost which visited Gertrude Carston in the early morning, soon became a habitué of her waking hours. He was a very importunate little ghost, and having once been given the entrée, he concluded that he was always welcome. But, though he was unpleasant enough at the time, he was slightly medicinal in character, or rather, not so much medicinal as health-giving. He did not exactly correct existing defects, but opened fresh springs within her. So far, however, he was medicinal, in that he was operative after the dose, which always continued bitter to the taste. But the bitterness was a good bitterness, and occasioned not discontent with Reggie, but discontent with herself, and it is always worth a good deal of bitterness to become wholesomely, not morbidly, discontented with oneself. She began to see in her nature unsuspected limitations, a thing quite as salutary, though not perhaps so pleasant, as the sight of unsuspected distances. A consciousness of unsuspected distance is liable to breed content, which is more injurious to the average mind—and she was quite average—than the discouraging discovery of a near horizon of unsuspected limitations, for the latter cause a revolt of something within us—which some call pride, and others spiritual aspiration—which refuses to acquiesce, and insists on those limitations becoming merely landmarks and milestones.

  And, indeed, to see such a limitation is a long step towards correcting it. The young mind, to which growth is as natural as it is to the young body, if it has any of that irrepressible, unconscious elasticity, which is the main characteristic of its divine remoteness from age, will never acquiesce in a limitation it sees. It will, somehow or other, clamber over that horizon’s rim, and though it may get many a fall, though it may be benighted and foot-sore and weary, that same divine youthfulness, which heals its physical fibres when they are bruised or cut, will repair its mental fibres. Its potentialities for recuperation are as strong as its refusal to be bounded. Youth may be crude, exaggerated, headstrong, but when the advocates of a temperate and bloodless senility have said all they can against it, they must confess that it is young.

  What made this inward struggle so trying to Gertrude was, that she was unable, from the essential nature of it, to guess what was happening. All she knew was the sense of tangible limitations and dim tracts beyond, and an imperative necessity to flounder, as best she could, towards them. But she found much comfort in her love for Reggie, and in the knowledge of his love for her; she felt as if she was following some thin golden thread through a maze of bewildering twilight, but while that was secure in her hand, the maze and the twilight and the bewilderment were comparatively unimportant.

  The Davenports had moved up to London in April, and Gertrude was with them again for a week before she went abroad to Aix with her mother in May. Mrs. Carston was a weak, fretful invalid, who always insisted on her daughter’s cheerful and robust support while she went through a course of somewhat unnecessary baths and massages. The great city was just beginning to settle down to its great effort of amusing itself for three months, and the Morning Post recorded, morning by morning, some fresh additions to the big fair. The Davenports, in virtue of Mr. Davenport’s modest contribution to the task of governing the nation, had been duly entered on the books for the year, and their blinds in Grosvenor Square testified to the accuracy of the announcement.

  Reggie and Gertrude were sitting in the dining-room about half-past ten one morning. Reggie was apt to treat breakfast as a movable feast, and this morning he had been out riding till after ten, and had only just come back. It was a hot, bright day, and he had taken the liberty, which had broadened down from precedent to custom, to ride in a straw hat. This particular straw hat was new, and had a very smart I. Z. ribbon round it, and Gertrude was seeing how it would look on her. She was suffering from a slight cold, and had not gone out with him, but she found it pleasant enough to wait, after she had finished breakfast, and skim the daily papers till he returned.

  She was deeply absorbed in the total disappearance of a French poodle when Reggie entered after dressing, and she laid down the paper to pour out tea for him.

  “The Row was fuller this morning,” said he, “and the Parliamentary train was in great force.”

  “What’s the Parliamentary train?”

  “Oh! The string of people who walk up and down very slowly, with a row of grooms behind; you know the sort.”

  “Any one there you knew?”

  “Yes; several people. Gerty, give me another bit of sugar. Percy was there, looking for his sister. Apparently they’ve come back. Jim Armine was there too, also looking for Percy’s sister.”

  “Lady Hayes?”

  “Yes,” said Reggie, eating steadily on. “I went and looked too. But we couldn’t find her. By the way, Percy wants us to go there to lunch.”

  Gertrude had a sudden sense that all this had happened before, that she was going to act again in a rather distasteful scene. She had a sudden, instinctive desire not to go there, a quite irrational dislike to the idea.

  “Oh! I can’t,” she said. “I’ve got a cold.”

  Reggie looked up innocently.

  “Oh! I’m so sorry for not asking. Is it worse? Poor dear!”

  Gertrude had a quite unusual dislike of white, excusable lies.

  “No, it’s not worse; it’s rather better,” she said.

  “Let’s go, then.”

  “Oh! I don’t want to, Reggie,” she said. “I want to go to the concert at St. James’. They’re going to do the Tannhäuser overture.”

  “That’s Wagner, isn’t it?” said Reggie, doubtfully. “I think Wagner is ugly.”

  “Oh, you exceedingly foolish boy,” said Gertrude. “You might as well call a storm at sea ugly.”

  “I don’t care,” said Reggie, “I think it is hideous. Besides, I want to go to the Hayes.”

  “Oh, well, then you just sha’n’t,” said Gertrude. “Really, I want to go awfully to this.”

  “But it’ll be much worse for your cold than going out to lunch.”

  “Oh, I give up my cold,” said she. “I
haven’t got one, really.”

  Reggie ate marmalade attentively.

  “Do take me to the concert,” said Gertrude. “I’m going away in two days. You can go and lunch with the Hayes then. It’s a waste of time going out to lunch.”

  “You see, I promised to go to the Hayes,” he said.

  “Oh, nonsense! Send a note to say you have got to go to the concert. It’s quite true; you have got to go.”

  “Of course, if I have got to—” said he slowly.

  “That’s right. It begins at three, doesn’t it? No; don’t say we can do both, because it is quite impossible. You’re very good to me, Reggie.”

  Gertrude felt intensely relieved, but she could not have told why. There had been something in the conversation she had held with Reggie, six months before, on the subject of Eva, which remained in her mind, and gave her a sense, not of danger, but of distrust. A sensitive mind need not, usually is not, the most analytical, and for this reason, to apply analysis to her unwillingness to see Eva, would yield either no results, or false ones. There is an instinct in animals which enables them to discriminate between their friends and their foes, and the keener that instinct is, the more instantaneous it is in its working. The anatomist can tell us the action of the heart with almost absolute accuracy; he can say how the blood gets oxydised in the lungs, how it feeds the muscles and works the nerves—but the one thing he cannot tell us is, why it does so. And these instincts, like the action of the heart, can be noted and expressed, but the reason of their working we shall not know just yet. An action may be pulled to pieces like a flower, and divided into its component parts, and labelled with fifty crack-jaw names, but the life of the flower ceases not to be a delicate, insoluble mystery to us.